Open Forum: Time for a reality check on nuclear diplomacy

A mushroom cloud billows into the sky about one hour after an atomic bomb was detonated above Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945. A worldwide movement wants to abolish nuclear weapons.

Photo: AP Photo / U.S. Army via Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum 1945

On Monday,diplomats from around the world are meeting at the United Nations in New York to review the state of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. This treaty, commonly known as the NPT, came into force 49 years ago, and is widely regarded as the cornerstone of international disarmament and nonproliferation diplomacy.

But if it is the cornerstone, then what is the evidence of its effectiveness? Has it blocked the spread of nuclear weapons?

Has it reduced the size of the global nuclear arsenal?

Has it led to meaningful nuclear disarmament or even to a diminished risk that nuclear weapons will be used?

Perhaps one asks too much of a treaty that was negotiated a half century ago. At that time, the United States and the Soviet Union were ideological and military adversaries, but they also had recently avoided — barely — a nuclear catastrophe in the wake of Soviet deployment of nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was a major wake-up call for both Moscow and Washington, and it prompted them to negotiate several arms control accords, including the NPT.

In some respects, the promise of the NPT has been realized. The pace of proliferation has been much slower than anticipated, and the treaty’s membership now includes almost all the nations of the world. To be sure, three nuclear-armed states — India, Pakistan and Israel — refused to join. A fourth — North Korea — joined and then chose to withdraw. But of the 13 past and present nuclear nations, four countries (South Africa, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine) renounced those weapons and ratified the treaty.

The size of the global nuclear arsenal is much smaller today than it was at the peak of the Cold War — a fact that the two states with the largest nuclear forces, the United States and Russia, say shows their good faith under the treaty to pursue negotiations to stop the nuclear arms race at an early date and eventually achieve nuclear disarmament.

What is less evident is whether any of the nuclear-armed states actually believes in nuclear disarmament.

It is also unclear if the overall reduction in nuclear weapons has made the world a safer place. Indeed, we believe that the use of nuclear weapons is actually more likely today than at any time in recent memory.

The greatest nuclear danger today is the potential for a military confrontation among nuclear-armed states because of mistake, miscalculation or accident. The danger of nuclear blunder has always existed. In fact, there have been a large number of “close calls” in the past that did not escalate into military conflict.

The biggest difference between today and the past is that there is an absence of trust between the United States and Russia. There simply is no inclination on either side to interpret ambiguous information — such as an early warning signal of a missile launch — as anything other than the worst case.

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan, shown in 1987, both made the key contribution to ending the Cold War between the nuclear superpowers, the United States and Russia.

Photo: Gary Hershorn / Reuters 1987

In order to reduce this risk of the unthinkable, a number of prominent U.S. and Russian figures have suggested that the leaders of both nations reaffirm the 1985 Reagan-Gorbachev statement “that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

Ideally, this modest measure would be endorsed by the leaders of the other nuclear weapons states — perhaps in 2020 on the 50th anniversary of the entry into force of the NPT. Such a declaration would indicate that even at a time when the world is in disarray, some fundamental, shared interests can be identified with respect to preventing a nuclear catastrophe.

Sadly, a recent and little-noted effort to secure a joint statement by the five NPT-recognized nuclear weapons states along these lines proved impossible. Only China was prepared to endorse the Reagan-Gorbachev principle, while France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States either refused outright to join the statement on the basis that it was at odds with their current nuclear doctrine or declined without explanation.

A new intercontinental ballistic missile, called the RS-24, is launched at the Plesetsk launch, northwestern Russia, in 2007. Are Russia and the United States, which between them own more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, serious about disarmament? .

Photo: Associated Press 2007

It is hard to maintain faith in the future of the NPT when states cannot even agree on the principle that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. When countries meet next week to review the performance of the NPT, they should insist that the nuclear weapons states publicly declare their positions on this basic existential issue.

Jerry Brown is the former governor of California and current executive chairman of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. William Potter is Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar Professor of Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.